If you’re not growing your partner relationship network, you’re most likely missing out on the bigger strategic plays partners are pursuing in your accounts, losing out on joint pursuits, or missing out on partner funding, or programs available for innovation and early adoption programs.

Here are a few Why’s and Best Practices to help you realize more out of Partnerships and incorporate those approaches into your your overall plans on account level.

Why build relationship with Partners

Best Practices

• Communication Plan – establish bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly, etc. meeting cadence to share updates, stay connected, and drive joint pursuits. More frequent touch points the better, but start somewhere
• “One Partner Team” – Identify and get to know key Partner contacts who are engaged or dedicated to your Customer. Reciprocate by outlining your account team structure and who is who from your company on the account
• Gives/Gets – partnerships are about Gives and Gets as in any relationship. Expect to do a lot of Partner “Gives” first as you build rapport, establish cadence, and build trust
• Scorecard – really understand Scorecard, KPIs, OKRs of your Partner team. You can have A LOT of great discussions, planning sessions, idea sharing BUT if they’re not aligned to what your Partner team is measured on (and compensated on, what “retires their quota”), those are unlikely to materialize
• Stakeholder Maps – share your stakeholder mapping, e.g., who are the stakeholders, executive sponsors or your day-to-day contacts. Understand the same from your Partner
• Executive Sponsors – as part of stakeholder mapping, identify and align executive sponsorships from your and Partner organizations. Arrange meetings to connect and build rapport on the executive level
• Deal Sharing – share your projects in flight, upcoming deals pipeline and see where intersection points are for joint pursuits and where help is needed to close. Ideally share that pipeline using Partner tools, see point below on data driven discussions
• Data Driven Discussions – ground your Partner discussions with data. For example, how do your projects influence Partner products, services, revenue? This is where registering/sharing deal pipeline with Partners via their Deal Registration portals and tools come into play. Also, in case of Cloud Solution Providers, you can also tag cloud projects, subscriptions using your Partner Ids to show real impact on Partner revenue growth. In some cases, you may even be eligible to receive “credits” back from those partners for influencing a particular product. That’s $ you can use to “re-invest” back into your Customer, Partner relationship and drive even more joint deals
• Joint Account Plan – create a joint plan and outline top ~3-5 key joint initiatives, projects that you will pursue over next 3, 6, 12 months
• Be Intentional – be intentional with what you propose to do jointly or have a brainstorming session with a Partner to figure it out. But do your homework, even before brainstorming, being intentional is a much better approach vs. asking your Partner what they think we can do jointly and expecting them to pull you into projects. For example, you might be intentional and outline that we want to partner and win on Initiative X or Project Y because of Reasons XYZ
• Bring Big Ideas, 10X growth ideas, Industry Points of View into your discussions. Remember Gives/Gets, you must bring value to your relationship
• ASKS – have clear ASKs for your Partner team. For example, you might need a workshop or a meeting with a Partner to validate ideas before proposing to Customer, or you’re running into technical challenges that Partner team can help clarify, or you have an idea for a solution but can’t get a meeting with a Customer stakeholder where Partner might help using their relationship network, etc.
• Go to meetings together, do joint workshops, participate/collaborate on RFPs together – Showing up together in front of your Customer builds trust, credibility for both parties, it’s 1+1=3 better together story. Also, Partners are bringing your Customer to their executive briefing center for strategy discussions. You can offer to help Partner prepare and support those discussions
• “Follow the (Marketing) Money” – understand what partners marketing and selling to your Customer. It could be a specific vertical solution with technology solving specific industry use cases, it could be the next generation or version of the product, etc. This could help you align your ideas, solutions, go to market motions, etc. to those themes as part of your overall account plan
• NDA – be mindful of your NDA terms, establish 3-way NDAs, if necessary, to enable more open information sharing between yourself, Customer and Partner

Early in my career, I worked with a Chief Medical Officer at the Healthcare Software company and what struck me most during my collaboration was his story about 5 Rights – 5 Rights of Medication Administration. It is a general recommendation in the healthcare setting to significantly prevent, reduce medication errors and harm when administrating medicine. The way it works is that you, or family member, or healthcare provider (care team, doctor, nurse, etc.) should always be mindful and apply “5 Rights” by asking 5 simple questions right before administering medicine. You have to ask, “Do I (you) have…”:

• the right patient
• the right drug
• the right dose
• the right route
• and the right time

This simple checklist helps prevent errors, helps reduce waste and unnecessary harm. I’ve shared this checklist with all family members, friends, colleagues, etc. anyone who is going to the hospital, or at the hospital, or going to the doctor to get prescriptions.

This simple art of checklist power further influenced me when I read Atul Gawande’s book “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right”. Atul brings to life stories that are super simple, common sense, repeatable and that produce outsized results. From preventing hospital acquired infections (a big problem for US Healthcare) by simply using checklists for doctors, nurses to wash their hands before and after seeing patients; to reducing errors and power struggles during surgeries; to preventing and dealing with mid-air aircraft failures using flight manuals and yes simple checklists to rely on.

Including simple repeatable, yet frequently forgotten, steps on a checklist and incorporating checklists into the routines professionals follow, increases adoption of best practices and standardizes best practice adoption.

Over the years, I started documenting and taking notes of my own best practices, checklists, “manuals” to deal with my own practices, inefficiencies and what I’ve seen in the professional life as a lot of wasted processes, a lot “re-created wheels”, time and money wastes, etc. To me, a simple premise was if I did something once, I wanted to document it, distill it into something repeatable in a form of the best practice, checklist. And then come back to it when I have to do it again, repeat it, learn from it and then improve on it, rather than re-creating or re-doing it from scratch.

My intent with these posts is to share what I’ve learned, created and evolved over the past 20+ years working in software development, professional services firms, managing partners & alliances, building business units and practices. My first “Right” was imprinted on me early in my career when our team had a concept for “Make It Right” or “MIR” Funds. Those were intended to make it right for the customers when software development projects went off rails. The goal was to make sure we deliver and go above and beyond to make it…right.

My thinking evolved over time around my own 5 Rights and will continue to evolve.  I use them every day as my “North Star” navigating professional and personal lives. I hope they’ll be of value to you even if you’re not in the industries I mentioned above as I intent to cover a wide range of topics aligned to those Rights that could be applicable to you. Topics around professional, personal productivity and mindfulness; checklists, tips, hacks, lessons learned to help improve efficiency, effectiveness.

My 5 Rights are around the following Principles and Values that I’ll dive deeper in subsequent posts.

• Make It Right – make it right for the customer, focus on the customer success, pain point, experience, satisfaction
• Make It Real – make real products, produce deliverables and real tangible things, make stuff that works
• Make It Repeatable – make it re-usable, iterate, learn, improve what you learned, adjust, and “rinse and repeat”
• Make It Measurable – make it count, focus on outcome, output, “Make it Rain”
• Make It Meaningful – find the why, why is it important, make it in the right frame of mind, make it mindful

On this journey, if we become even 1%, 5%, 10%, etc. better, those saved hours add up to big numbers over the years. For example, 5% of 2,000 typical working hours a year is 100 hours to use for your personal or professional “bank” however you want, that’s 2.5 weeks of mental vacation.

Let’s Make it Happen.

Keep the following approaches in mind during your conversation and structure questions around these themes:

• POGO – Personal, Organizational, Goals, Obstacles
• BANT – Budget, Authority, Need, Time

Questions to draw from during your conversation(s), you’re not going to ask everything, but here is a backlog to consider:

• Problem, Challenges, Obstacles, Pains
  • What is a Business Problem we are solving?
  • What is a Business Driver?
  • What are Use Cases?
  • Any current pains?
• What
  • What are you trying to do?
  • What are we solving for?
  • What does your [App, Product, Service] do?
• Business, Customer Outcomes
  • What Outcomes are you looking for?
• What is the intent?
• Roadmap, Strategy, Vision, Goals, Priorities?
  • Do you have a [Cloud] Strategy?
  • How is it aligned to Business Problems?
  • What are your Priorities?
  • What do you care about?
• Why, Drivers?
  • WHY?
  • WHY are you doing this?
  • WHY did you call us?
• Success Criteria
  • How do you Measure success?
  • What is Success Criteria?
  • What does Success, “Good” look like?
• Business KPIs
  • What KPIs at the end will show we achieved success, right outcomes?
• ASK
  • What is the ASK?
• Use Case
  • What is the Use Case?
• Scope
  • What’s in Scope?
• Sponsor, Stakeholders
  • Do you have exec sponsor support?
  • Who are executive sponsors for this effort?
  • Who is part of the cross organizational core team involved in making a decision?
• Competitive Differentiator
  • What is different about your product, services?
• Competition
  • Who do you compete against?
• Budget
  • What is your budget?
  • Do they have budget allocated to this project?
• Responsibilities
  • What is responsibility split b/n partner, client, other partners, etc.
• Engagement
  • What does perfect engagement looks like e.g. strategy, staff, etc.?
• Workshop, Working Session
  • Ask for a working session, with Demo, and THEN we can suggest, recommend next steps, ideas, proposals
• Demo
  • Ask for a Demo
• Timelines, Due Date
  • What are the timelines, due dates?

What separates you apart from competitors who are providing the same service as you? If you’re doing business as usual and your projects are in the “green” status, have good customer feedback, what else should you be doing to avoid becoming a commodity service for them that could be easily replaced? Here are some ideas: 

• Continuously improve, innovate, offer new ideas, new ways of providing value and services, new consultative ways to solve problems, propose new solutions, show “what good looks like”, etc.  Have improvement plans in place that show what you’re improving, how it is progressing, etc. Customers are working with you and value your ideas and pro-activeness to make them better. Customer are actually eager to hear about those, they brought you to help, to consult, to offer new insights
• Hackathons – do one internally with your team, or better yet, jointly with a customer so you can actually work on specific business use cases that will resonate and land with the customer to drive ROI and real value that is important for them
• Create an Innovation Fund – For example, put X% of the value of the contract into the “fund” matched by the customer so you can engage in innovative, CXO, visible projects. This could also be used with discounts. Instead of discounting a certain percentage of the deal to the customer, put this money into the “fund” to be used for activities in this list
• Create Innovation Programs, Run POCs, Pilots that demonstrate solving real challenges for the customer. Show innovative ways to solve a problem or introduce a new feature into the product, or ways to re-architect a problem, etc. 
  Explore as pilots, POCs emerging technologies e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, RPA, Blockchain, etc.
• Accelerators, IP – offer accelerators, IP to kick start new projects, accelerate new ways of doing projects, minimize time to market, increase re-usability 
• Create Training Labs, Bench for your and customer team to learn new skills, be available to help in “burst” mode on specific projects, or shadow specific projects, or simply be ready for the next upcoming project ahead of time.

Here are some thoughts to include in your proposal outline and general best practices to consider to make your pitches successful.

Outline

Best Practices

• Exec Summary for Each Deal – For each deal, list the following about the Deal
  • Deal type – e.g. Proactive
  • Deal nature – e.g. Modernization efforts for in Store for Pharmacy Services
  • Deal buyer – e.g. XYZ, VP Product Services
  • Deal tech, solution – e.g. Human Centered Design Research
  • Industry – e.g. HCLS
  • Pursuit team – e.g. Digital, Account, Delivery
  • Win Themes
• Buyers, Stakeholders, Champions
  • Identify who is a buyer, Champion
• Identify a pursuit team
  • Align at the right level e.g. you don’t want your junior team “selling” to VP. Match up your pursuit team and customer on the right governance level
  • Identify contact from Presales Team who will help orchestrate putting Proposal in PPT, WORD together
  • Delivery Manager – ideally identified and part of the pursuit team who will drive the engagement and validate resource plan, estimates, etc.
  • Solution Architect – US and Offshore (to work in same time zone as presales and scale onsite SA)
  • Identify contact from Presales Team who will help orchestrate putting Proposal in PPT, WORD together
• Ownership, Due Dates – assign
• Research
  • Research all the customer attendees who will be in the room or on the call during orals presentation. Do LinkedIn relationship analysis, e.g. who are we connected to, etc.
  • if it’s in response to an RFP, try to get as much context as possible, meet / talk to customer (not to circumvent VMO though), meet for introductions so they at least know you, otherwise you’ll be “Supplier Number 5” in the process and in their minds.
• Briefing Document
  • Create briefing description of the opportunity, stakeholder, account background, etc. (Account Team should own and start this and this could be shared with all Pursuit team members to get up to speed on the deal, opportunity)
• Questions & Clarifications with Customer
  • Ask for additional documents to share
  • Have customer show demo of the product or pilot they’ve done or demo
  • Prepare list of questions, share with customer ahead of time, setup a session to review
  • If it’s in response to an RFP, try to get as much context as possible, meet / talk to customer (not to circumvent VMO though), meet for introductions so they at least know you, otherwise you’ll be “Supplier Number 5” in the process and in their minds.
• Start with End in Mind
  • Work Backwards from Message, Outcome you desire to achieve, Deliverables, or End of Project Success e.g. Future PR (Amazon style)
• Outline
  • Braindump and create Outline of the proposal
  • Create a story that follows AND, BUT, THEREFORE format (ABT)
    • AND = positive message, agreement (or Setup in storytelling)
    • AND = more positive messages, more agreement
    • BUT = problem, challenge, contradiction
    • THEREFORE – consequences, solution, action, next step
• Briefing, About you Company
  • If new customer, ask them for time to brief them on Company and get introduced. It’s not breaking RFP rules, you’re introducing your Company in general. Otherwise you’ll be “Supplier Number 5” to them. Also, when I lost RFPs, I’d ask customer for a chance to give Company briefing, it led to better relationships and other RFPs, deals, wins in areas where we could win.
• Message, What are you Selling or Proposing?
  • Have a message. Could be the value prop or Why your Company, but have a clear message. Have it day 1 so everyone is aligned to that message, theme.
  • Always know what you’re “selling”. Know exactly those 3-5 things that you’re selling in the proposal.
  • Same Message, Keywords, Lexicon introduced in the executive summary should flow throughout the proposal.
• Answer the questions
  • “What exactly are you proposing?”
  • “What am I (as a customer) getting for $XYZ spent?”
  • “What is the outcome after the meeting?”
  • “What does success look like after the meeting?”
  • “So What?”
• Ask
  • Ask Customer what they’re really looking for (can do offline, unofficially)
• Executive Sponsor
  • assign executive sponsor on the deal, account level.
• Review Ahead of Time w. Execs
  • Review Pricing, approach, presenter list with your Company Exec team to align so it doesn’t happen the night before presentation if we need to make any adjustments
• Pricing
  • REALLY understand what goes into pricing, all the rates, roles, investments, discounts, licensing, etc.
  • During Orals this is one area where you should anticipate to be “grilled” and questioned by the customer.
  • Know your numbers cold or what goes into to those numbers.
  • Must have Excel Model to support it. Excel should have Resource Plan outlined by role, rate, monthly allocation, etc. and include any discounts, etc. that you’re offering.
  • Have P&L Model done on the deal as well so we understand the margins in case we need to discount
• Output, Format, Content
  • It’s easier to build PPT proposal vs. WORD, try to steer customer to submit PPT proposals
  • If you’re submitting WORD doc, also consider submitting a reduced version of the PPT as the companion deck
  • Put a Thought Provoking slide into the presentation. I’ve seen digital teams do that to spur conversation. One Pitch had “LOVE” word listed and asked the customer what’s opposite (Apathy not Hate). It was a build up to the story that would follow later in the presentation.
  • Artifacts, Creative Ideas – if possible, embed in your proposal actual ideas, screen shots, pictures, photos, wireframes, how we went about our process ideating for the proposal (e.g. white boarding, mobile app screen shots). Example: when we responded to one of the customer’s RFP we actually created mock up screens for the mobile app and we showed pictures of the internal workshop that we ran to come up with mock  up design, and white boarding sessions full of sticky notes.
  • WHAT, HOW, WHEN – In the proposal, focus on what we are going to do EXACTLY for the Customer. Remove marketing, marketecture or move to Appendix.
  • Outline how what we propose is aligned to Customer strategy, key initiative or pain points e.g. what we propose, how does it help them save cost in Cloud
  • Show “What good [end state, architecture, solution] looks like”.
• “Readout, Pre-read”
  • “Prime” the customer, organize “Pre-Read” Session – “pre-read”, preview draft proposal with key individuals, coaches at the client. Meet with them ahead of time. They can help fine-tune your pitch, plus they’ll start priming their own stakeholders
• Competition
  • Find out about competitors, what they’re doing, where are they failing or succeeding.
• Workshop
  • Pre-Proposal – Ask to do a Workshop, Discovery, Assessment or just a few hour meeting to understand more about their business, problem, etc. before submitting a proposal (paid or as investment) so you can learn and fine-tune your message in the proposal. Or you can do it after proposal and orals to fine-tune/revise the proposal.
  • Post-Proposal – Offer Validation Working Session/Workshop to get to SOW. Frame it to zero in on deliverables, scope to prepare to put SOW together. You can include an ASK in the proposal to do follow up workshop (e.g. half-day, full day) to dig deeper into scope and refine approach, estimate
• Orals – identify a small team who will present to a customer face to face (best way). Every speaker should have a part, don’t overload the customer by bringing a lot of people into the meeting.
  • BRING RIGHT TEAM – who will be able to close the deal and speak, not just be passengers
  • People who present should be involved in the RFP or building the proposal early on so they don’t change the message at the very end
  • Presentation – limit number of voices that speak so you don’t continuously switch between speakers, that maybe confusing.
  • Dry run it ahead of time
  • Meet with team face to face (most likely twice during business trip evening dinner the night before and during breakfast the morning of presentation) and run through flow and who’s covering which slide and make any last min slide adjustments
• During Presentation
  • Company Overview – Ask “How much you know about our Company” before jumping in. You might have to cover Company 101 Story briefly before jumping into the details of the proposal.
  • After “Here is what we’ve heard slide”, pause during the presentation and ask “Did we miss anything? What else is the problem?” Have the customer help you fill the gaps by talking so it doesn’t feel like a one-way conversation during your pitch
  • Ask a customer what success looks like? What are Conditions of Satisfaction? (ideally you ask before as you qualify opportunity)
• Case Studies
  • It’s powerful to include video in your presentation, short one e.g. 1-2 mins. For example, Google story.
• Partner Channel
  • Find out if there is partner e.g. Microsoft involved.
  • Meet with their Account, Technical Team. Meet Industry team covering that account. Get them to jointly pitch or create joint slide about engagement, partnership model.
  • Find Executive sponsor supporting their account.
• Delivery Practices
  • If working with Delivery Practices e.g. Cloud, Data, suggest to Practice and Presales teams to setup a separate working and hands-on session without extended Account Team (AM, DM). That way Practice team can work on ideas, scope, approach, team model, etc. independently AND THEN bring teams (Practice, Account) together for review. For examples, Tue, Th could be all-up reviews with Account Team and M, W, F as hands on working sessions by Practices/Presales teams.
• Assumptions
  • If you can’t clarify with Customer any details, Q&A, then just make a set of assumptions in your proposal and then you can validate it during “pre-read” or during preso